6.30 am: Meeting with the CEO and CFO to check what they’re going to say on TV and give them some ideas. Normally the chairman would be there too, but he is flying in from New York, as his son recently graduated.
6.57 am: One analyst always phones in anticipation of the Regulatory News Service (RNS) going out at the stock exchange, as he thinks he might not get through at 7 am. We keep him online, watching the screens and waiting for the RNS.
7 am: The RNS hasn’t appeared.
7.01 am: It still hasn’t appeared.
7.02 am: The RNS finally hits the screen, and there’s a whole lot of red flashing through.
7.05 am: Ben Verwaayen (CEO) appears on CNBC and Hanif Lalani (CFO) on Bloomberg a bit later. I’m reading the analyst notes coming out and firing off emails to management members to brief them on what to expect for the 11 am presentation, all the while watching Ben and Hanif on TV. We need to take calls until 11 am, even though the market won’t have had the full messaging yet. You need to prepare stacks of Q&As in advance. Normally questions to us are technical, like: ‘How do I populate my model?’, whereas management on the stage is asked more about the running of the business.
7.55 am: I phone the driver to check whether the chairman’s landed and he says, ‘He’s out but I haven’t got him’. I tell him to hurry up.
8 am: The market opens and the share price is up 4p, so we are fairly calm.
8.05 am: The CEO, CFO, PR officer and I are back in Ben’s office for a call to Reuters, Bloomberg and Dow Jones newswires. Ben is presenting results and taking questions. The only compromising question they ask is whether private equity has made a bid and Ben says: ‘No.’ Five minutes later he says: ‘No private equity bid’ is flashing up on the wires. During the call Ben has his TV on in the corner and I’m watching the share price ticker go past. Having started up 4p, we see the share price collapsing while we’re on the phone and management is worrying whether it is saying anything wrong.
8.30 am: We’re down 10p and at the bottom of the FTSE and we are wondering what the hell is going on! I try to give a ‘don’t panic’ message.
8.45 am: Back in the IR office, I’m trying to work out why the share price is going down and what Ben and Hanif have to do on the stage to bring it back up. I write down nine key messages, reminding people that the buyback is not today, but over the next two years; that the dividend is payable in September at 10p, so if you buy the shares today, you get a 3 percent yield in just four months; that the restructuring charge gives cost savings going forward. I think shareholders feel this is the end of an era, now that Christopher Bland’s going, so my messages are all about the future.
9 am: Conference call with industry analysts Ovum.
10 am: I issue those nine key messages, having been chased by Ben.
10.30 am: I get a call telling me the chairman’s arrived and can I come see him?
10.35 am: I get another call: ‘The new chairman’s arrived, are you shepherding today?’ I tell him he should see the results, but we don’t want to risk people questioning him in the auditorium, so we suggest he watches the results via webcast in Ben’s office. I don’t need to be acting as concierge to the new chairman, however, when I’m supposed to be giving out these messages to people. So I give the current chairman his points and brief him, before having a quick chat to the new chairman, saying, ‘Glad you’re here – got to run!’
11.00 am: The presentation starts, we’ve all piled downstairs and the auditorium’s filling up. The question at this point is: can we reverse the decline in share price? Some of the Q&As come up and you can see both the chairman and Ben pushing out the messages I’ve given them. It’s not that they don’t think of the messages themselves, but it helps if you bring them all together.
12.30 pm: I get Anthony Bolton, chief investment officer of Fidelity, to give us a video. He knows the chairman well, so we play a surprise three-minute message from Anthony in the auditorium. He says how well Christopher did in rescuing BT and our chairman gets a standing ovation at the end.
1 pm: I grab a quick sandwich with some old friends, who choose today – of all days! – to meet up in town. I’m glad to be able to see them for 20 minutes.
1.20 pm: Back at the office, I help my team do a summary of the analysts’ points and prepare for a conference call later to explain to senior management what we’ve told the market and why the share price is down.
2.15 pm: I have to address a cost-reduction forum – I do group control as well as IR so on results day, I’m asked to come along for 10 minutes to do a speech on why cost reduction is so important.
2.30 pm: Back in Ben’s office, there’s an internal conference call for the 100 senior managers in BT to tell them how the day’s gone. I explain that, despite the good results, they still have to step up cost-reduction activities, because the market seems to think the BT story has ended.
3 pm: A couple of big investors expressed an interest in our shareholder return policy before the results, so it’s my duty to phone them to explain why we’ve done what we’ve done compared with what they thought we might do. The call to the investor in favor of buybacks is clearly easier to make than the call to the investor preferring a special dividend. I have to make the latter understand that we considered all shareholder views including his, but that we can’t please everyone.
3.30 pm: I try to catch up on some emails, as I haven’t looked at them much today.
4 pm: I have a one-to-one with the chairman to review the day. He’s quite mellow about the situation and insists that we’ll have a better day tomorrow. It’s clear by now that we aren’t going to rescue the share price today.
4.45 pm: The markets have closed and we’re down 9p; bottom of the FTSE. We have to write an email note for BT people to explain the share price movement each day. So what do I say for today? It will just sound like IR is incompetent. But I don’t think people blame us – I’ve been doing this long enough now. I had the bubbly all ready to crack open, but by 4.45 pm I don’t really feel like it anymore.
Postscript: the next day: A lot of effort went into this one day – management geared itself up for it, the adrenaline was pumping and you feel deflated that all your effort’s going into that one number. When I read the glowing press reports the next day I felt better, especially as we were up 3p again. We eventually did get to open the champers on May 23 when we broke the 325p barrier for the first time in nearly six years, closing at 326.5p. On May 29 we closed at a new high of 330.5p, so the roadshow was obviously doing the trick.
